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Telltale Signs of Organizations with Strong EA

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Footprints on fresh snow
(photo credit: dru!)

Walking on fresh snow is one of my favorite activities, as I enjoy leaving the first footprints in the soft, fluffy snow.  My impact on the snow is evident to those that come after me.  What impacts should EA have on organizations?  What do EA’s footprints look like?  Here are answers from three authoritative sources, on tell tale signs that an organization has effective EA.

1. Clarity on Long-term Plans

The book “Enterprise Architecture as Strategy” believes that enterprise architecture help organizations focus on building strategic capabilities, instead of constantly being distracted by immediate needs. It does that by providing a long-term view of an organization’s processes, systems and technologies [1].  This clarity works hand-in-hand with strong governance to help organizations achieve future states they desire.

Following on this point, EA should also enable organizations to have clarity on current capabilities.  Without this clarity, organizations end up building capabilities that they already have, or capabilities that are not supported by their existing processes, systems and technologies.

2. Strategic, Responsive and Cheap IT 

CIO.com sees that enterprise architecture makes IT cheaper, more strategic and responsive, and help promote alignment, standardization and re-use of IT assets [2].  This builds on the clarity mentioned in the previous point, such that IT works on what matters, is positioned for the future and designed to maximize reuse and reduce duplication.

3. Agile

Gartner sees enterprise architecture as a change enabler by “by creating, communicating and improving the key requirements, principles and models that describe the enterprise’s future state and enable its evolution.” [3]  In a way this is similar to #2, but this brings the impact beyond IT to the entire organization.

Other Impacts?

What other impacts should EA have?

References

1. Enterprise Architecture as Strategy: Creating a Foundation for Business Execution, Jeanne W. Ross, Peter Weill, David Robertson
2. Enterprise Architecture on CIO.com, http://www.cio.com/topic/3020/Enterprise_architecture
3. Gartner’s Definition of Enterprise Architecture, http://www.gartner.com/it-glossary/enterprise-architecture-ea/

Interoperability and interresponsibility

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(This one’s somewhat exploratory, so perhaps pardon me if I ramble a bit more even than usual here?) Reading Dion Hinchcliffe’s excellent post ‘Enterprise Social Networks Need Open Standards‘ left me pondering on the whole thorny issue of interoperability, and…

The Cloud is in the cloud

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This one’s another follow-up from the model-development session with Stuart Boardman last Friday, and relates to a different way to understand the often over-hyped Cloud. [I hasten to add that most of what follows is just a minor elaboration on an…

The Cybernetic View

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#bizarch One of the Six Views of Business Architecture is the Management View or Cybernetic View. To understand this view, let’s start by asking what kind of thing management is.

One way of thinking about management is as a particular bundle of capabi…

Link Collection — June 17, 2012

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  • Data Scientist (n.): Person who is better at stati

  • Why We Need More IT Leadership, Not Less – Valuedance

    “We don’t really need executives to blog, friend, or tweet, but we do need them to understand how their current IT capabilities stack up against the competition; how IT-enabled changes to business processes and information could enhance the customer experience; and what it means to sponsor a project, drive IT adoption, and realize value from IT-enabled investments.  It’s time (actually way past time) for executives to assume personal accountability for understanding and managing IT and to cascade digital accountability and authority down through their organizations by incorporating IT-smarts in job descriptions and hiring criteria.”

    tags: cio leadership susancramm

  • Rafael Nadal demonstrates Babolat Play & Connect interactive tennis racquet

    This is ‘data-gadget-sports’ cool. And hey, my tennis game has nowhere to go but up.

    “But tech can also make us better athletes by providing us with information about our sporting performance – whether it’s shoes which log a basketball player’s jumps, or outfits which give dancers feedback about their moves. Tennis players could soon be getting in on the tech-helping-hand action with the introduction of an interactive racquet.”

    tags: tennis babolet data

  • The Functional Art: An Introduction to Information Graphics and Visualization: An information graphics and visualization reading list

    Good list. I’ve read some — Roam, Tufte, Yau.

    Perhaps this one should be next for me:

    2. Nigel Holmes on Information Design, by Steven Heller (Amazon)The art director of The New York Times interviews one of the best infographics designers ever. 140 pages of insight.

    tags: information graphics visualization

  • When Venture Capitalists Become IT Consultants – Businessweek

    I see this with my clients. Establishing relationships with VCs is a part of a good listening post strategy

    “When Equinix (EQIX) Chief Information Officer Brian Lillie wants new business tools, he seeks advice from a venture capitalist, bypassing sources like IT consultants or the biggest names in enterprise software.

    He takes that unusual route because many of the latest innovations in cloud computing and software-as-a-service are coming from startups, not enterprise mainstays like Oracle (ORCL) or International Business Machines (IBM). Venture backers who get early looks at emerging companies as they consider cash infusions can be the best guides to the most promising new technology.

    tags: CIO CTO VC

  • Chevron explores the use of open source software called Hadoop to reduce costs. – The CIO Report – WSJ

    ““The ship collects ridiculous amounts of data,” said Walker. Chevron gathers information that includes five dimensions – the x and y coordinates of both the wave’s source and target – along with the time it was collected. The company uses Hadoop software to sort that data. It’s one step in more than 25 steps Chevron takes with the data to create a picture for engineers to use to locate oil reservoirs. Chevron uses a supercomputer to create models and simulations of the underground environment.”

    tags: chevron open source hadoop

  • Technology Business Management Council Creates New IT Benchmark – The CIO Report – WSJ

    Good idea. Share experience and metrics in commodity stuff. Free up CIO agenda for differentiating uses of technology.

    “A new non-profit group, launched today during a videoconference attended by over 500 members, says it wants to help CIOs by developing best practices and benchmarks they can use to run their IT organizations. The new group, the Technology Business Management Council, is an outgrowth of IT optimization services vendor Apptio, and inherits the vendor’s methodology for managing IT organizations. The organization’s governing council includes respected IT executives, including its co-chair, Cisco CIO Rebecca Jacoby, as well as First American Financial CIO Larry Godec and Clorox CIO Ralph Loura.

    The council is trying to address a problem CIOs have traditionally struggled to resolve– proving the value of the IT services their organizations provide, and making the case for IT investments the company needs to improve productivity and seize new market opportunities.”

    tags: IT management cio

  • How Starbucks is turning itself into a tech company | VentureBeat

    Similar to the creation of e-commerce groups in the 90s — mix of business and tech pros — organizations are now creating Digital Ventures for customer touching, revenue generating, business-technology (digital) capability. As e-commerce was led by tech-aware business exec (marketing), digital ventures are being run by Chief Digital Officers (CDO).

    This continues the bifurcation of classic IT into supporting and revenue lines.

    ‘Adam Brotman, formerly senior vice president of Starbucks Digital Ventures, was named to an entirely new executive role, chief digital officer. With the creation of the CDO role, all of Starbuck’s digital projects — web, mobile, social media, digital marketing, Starbucks Card and loyalty, e-commerce, Wi-Fi, Starbucks Digital Network, and emerging in-store technologies — were packaged together and placed under Brotman’s care.’

    tags: starbucks CDO

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Related posts:

  1. Link Collection — June 3, 2012
  2. Link Collection — June 10, 2012
  3. Link Collection — February 5, 2012

How to avoid common mistakes with your EA program – Part I

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by: Bill Cason – Troux CTO – June 12th, 2012
Part I: Overcome inexperience when initiating a program

I frequently see Enterprise Architecture (EA) practices make a common mistake when initiating a program. They think: We know what we are …

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Being Human: Why Knowledge Workers Need Adaptive Case Management

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How important is the human factor in driving meaningful process improvements for your business? I believe it is THE most important, and arguably the most difficult, aspect of any effort to improve performance. I recently participated in an educational virtual summit aptly titled ACMLive that considers what it takes to properly support human knowledge work. […]

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Inside-in, inside-out, outside-in, outside-out

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I’ve been brewing how to describe some key distinctions about the way we view our architecture, about how we see its role, and its relationship with everything else in its context. Seems to me that there’s a simple two-axis matrix we can use for this: where we focus – inside (centred on our own internal context) […]

Requisite-variety and stormy weather

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Just how much of a law is Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety? Our answers to that question – and likely there’ll be many of them – are fundamental to how we handle key architectural concepts or requirements such as management, control, certainty (or lack of it), complexity, disruption and much, much more. Okay, first, the […]